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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a